[Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling]@TWC D-Link book
Captains Courageous

CHAPTER IX
18/52

I want to feel we're moving.

Sit down and tell me the miles." Cheyne sat down and read the dial for her (there were some miles which stand for records to this day), but the seventy-foot car never changed its long, steamer-like roll, moving through the heat with the hum of a giant bee.

Yet the speed was not enough for Mrs.Cheyne; and the heat, the remorseless August heat, was making her giddy; the clock-hands would not move, and when, oh, when would they be in Chicago?
It is not true that, as they changed engines at Fort Madison, Cheyne passed over to the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers an endowment sufficient to enable them to fight him and his fellows on equal terms for evermore.

He paid his obligations to engineers and firemen as he believed they deserved, and only his bank knows what he gave the crews who had sympathised with him.

It is on record that the last crew took entire charge of switching operations at Sixteenth Street, because "she" was in a doze at last, and Heaven was to help any one who bumped her.
Now the highly paid specialist who conveys the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Limited from Chicago to Elkhart is something of an autocrat, and he does not approve of being told how to back up to a car.


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